AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
I don't know whether this was discussed here (didn't find in search) ... but the 10% efficacy of AZ against South African variant is troubling.
Oxford Covid vaccine has 10% efficacy against South African variant, study suggests
Small-scale trial of vaccine shows it offers very little protection against mild to moderate infectionwww.theguardian.com
Yeah it has been discussed at some point, but yes the AZ vaccine really doesn't work well against that variant. It shows up in correlates of protection as well. Have to be careful with small studies like that, and the protection against severe disease by AZ is unknown right now, I think. I would guess it's less good than other vaccines though. I don't see it as that troubling - it's just an indicator that AZ isn't great, which is unfortunate since a lot of the world is relying on it. I'm rather hopeful that maybe they'll attempt to modify their vaccine at some point. Remember they haven't actually made that many doses so modifying the vaccine is still a potential option. But first we need to know how well it does against severe disease. Even if it cuts deaths and hospitalizations by just 50% that would be a huge improvement!
The US will likely have good protection against this variant since we don't use AZ (though not as good as against wild type or the early variants). But again, we have no real clinical data telling us exactly how good it might be. It's a big unknown, but the data we do have suggests we will be well protected.